Tina Seelig The Art of Teaching Entrepreneurship and Innovation No.4
So let's move on to another concept and that concept is "Don't wait to be anointed." We all think that when we go into organizations, we are waiting for people to tell us what we are to do, right? We look for jobs. We wait for people to give us our assignments. But you know what? In most organizations there are endless other opportunities waiting there for you to turn into something wonderful. I realized the other day that when you get a job you aren't getting that job. You are getting the key to that building. And as soon as you're in that building it's up to you to figure out all of the other things you can do. And if you look at people who have really been successful that is what they have done. They haven't waited for other people to anoint them, for other people to tell them what to do. It's funny because this happened in my own life years ago when I started my first company. It was 1991 and I had written my first book and I said, "You have got to be kidding. There's got to be better way to market books." So I decided to start a company called BookBrowser that was a multimedia system to try to match books with buyers, and this was before the Web. It was a kiosk-based system and I pulled together all the ideas, and I put together a team, and I printed up business cards that said, "Tina L. Seelig, President." And I showed them to my dad. My dad looked at me and he said, "You've got to be kidding. You can't just call yourself President." Now, he had been a very, very successful multinational corporate executive and had risen up for the ranks from being an individual contributor, an engineer, and every couple of years getting a promotion, and promotion, and promotion, and promotion. So he looked at me as this little kid and said, "You can't just call yourself president," and I realized that was what entrepreneurs do. Entrepreneurs make their own business cards. They are the ones who are willing to build the ladder below them, as opposed to waiting for someone to put the ladder up in front of them. And this doesn't just happen with starting a company, it something that happens in any organization that you can be part of. And I'm going to play you a video clip that again came from the Innovation Tournament. This is the one with the rubber bands, and this is a team that captured the essence of the difference between that little switch between doing nothing and doing something. And how important it is if you just give yourself permission to take on challenges, you will do amazing things. So watch this: Male: I worked out for the first time in weeks. I guess I wept deeply with joy. Female: I finally took my chubby butt to the gym. Male 2: I carried a package for someone who was overburdened. Male 3: I said "thank you" more often. Female 2: I mustered up the courage to ask my crush out. Female 3: I spoke with my dear friend on the phone for an hour-and-a-half. I'm so glad to reconnect with her. True friends are treasures in life. Male 4: The Do Band is based on two insights we had. One, you can't force someone to agree with your cause. Without buy-in, nothing real is going to happen. Two, everyone has their own cause; something they should do. They want to do but they just never get to it, and this is what we're after. We want to get people over their block and get them to do it. Enter the Do Band. Female 3: The Do Band has a simple set of rules. One, put it on with a promise and don't take it off until you've fulfilled it. Two, record your success online, share your story. Three, pass it on. Male 4: Every Do Band comes with a serial number. When you record your success you can see what else your band has inspired. Each Do Band creates a chain of successes, and that's just one Do Bands, with many Do Bands it grows even quicker and with the addition of the Virtual Do Band, the numbers multiply astoundingly fast. Male 5: Do Bands, got locked by that promise. Male 6: What's happened with your Do Band? Male 5: I actually passed it off. Male 4: The Do Band creates value by appealing to our inner desires. In just 36 hours, we created social value, health value, entertainment value, and political value, to name a few. We may not have collected $500, but Do Bands kicked off a new summer camp, initiated tons of phone calls to mothers, inspired compliments and apologies, healthy eating, and many other personal contributions to the greater good. These little things add up and success is infectious. And one more thing: Actually, people did donate over $500 to the charities that they chose, and this is only in the beginning. Imagine it.
Tina Seelig: Pretty cool? It's so wonderful because a bunch of people around the world have seen this and other schools around the world had actually started doing this. Students have taken on this project and started passing around Do Bands in websites, and it's quite amazing the number of things that have been inspired just by this project. So, I want to end with a last theme, and that is "Never miss an opportunity to be fabulous." Now, this idea came out of something that happened by accident. A few years ago when I started teaching my course on creativity and innovation, I never used slides in my class. They're always, its very action oriented. But the first day of class I do so show some slides that described what's going to happen during that quarter, and on the very last slide I have some list of the things that I expect from the students, and what expect to myself. And the last bullet point is "Never miss an opportunity to be fabulous." I promise that I'm going to do my very, very best. I'm going to deliver as much as I can at every single class, and I expect the same from them. It's the first and last time I say it. But you know, this concept is incredibly sticky. And I think the reason it's so sticky is that people are waiting for this instruction. Think about it: In most classes people tell you what you need to do to get an A, and I certainly watch my kid who is now 20 years old and I watch him do the minimum amount to get an A. But could you imagine if everyone in the world only does the minimum amount to get an A, nothing amazing will happen. The key is we are all waiting to take the lid off and be told the sky's the limit. Well, let me tell you what happened with this. After I put the slide up, a few months later I kind of forgot about it and I was coming to class and there was someone, one of my students, who was sitting outside the classroom. Because she was listening to an iPod Nano, and she was kind of rocking out before class. And I said to her, "Boy Becky, I've never seen an iPod Nano before can I take a look at it?" She said, "Sure." She unplugged it and hand it to me. And apparently when you order one online you can have it engraved with whatever you want. Some people put their email address with their phone number in case it's lost. She turned it over, and what do you think was engraved on the back? "Never miss an opportunity to be fabulous." This is what she wanted to look at every single day, and I think that's what we all want to look at and especially when you're an entrepreneur. Every single day you are faced with challenges, and everyday you have to find an opportunity to be fabulous in a way that you solve problems, in the way you approach organizational issues, in the way that you deal with everything that comes your way.
So I'm going to end with a video clip that comes from a movie that was made about the Innovation Tournament. What happened is when - I told you at the beginning the Kauffman Foundation was enthusiastic about us rolling this out across the country and around the world. Well, they had a professional film crew that was capturing us, and they decided that they wanted to see what was going to happen with the Innovation Tournament. So they put film crews around the world. They were in Japan. They were in Australia. They were in India. They were in Ecuador. They were in Thailand. They were in the US, and this is a trailer of the movie they made. The movie is called "Imagine It," and this is a trailer of the movie they made about the project with Post-it notes. I think you'll recognize some of the folks in the movie. Male 1: Imagine the future the way you'd like to see it. Female 1: If you can imagine it then it can be. Male 2: Got to the problem and imagine a world where that problem has been removed and then say, "How many steps are there from this world to that world?" Female 2: Imagining a new future, a new path, a new direction. Male 3: If you had the power to imagine it and you had the power to change the world. Male 4: Imagine a more perfect world than the one we live in, and then to actually engaged in making that happen. Female 3: People think that pressure is bad. But pressure in a very short period of time can be very stimulating. Female 2: It taps into the rawest level of their creativity. Female 1: It puts down a gauntlet of challenge and inspiration. Male 5: You'll never have infinite resources. When you're given this constraint and this constraint is opposed to that. Male 6: We define the value of your own projects innovating outside the box. The box here is actually goes to you. Female 4: Entrepreneurship is an extreme sport. Getting it out and do it. Male 7: This is an important way to progress in life so the experiment can focus. Male 8: I'll bet you that you'll be blown away. Tina Seelig: So I hope you would agree that these sort of experiences in our classrooms and hopefully that many of you had an opportunity to participate in. Give students a really strong parachute even though we might push them off of a perfectly good cliff, and ask them to take some risks and try some things they've never done before. You can look at the journey as something that's really exciting. The fall is isn't a freefall; it's something that when you have all these skills when you make your own luck and never miss an opportunity to be fabulous, you end up creating this fabulous parachute for yourself. So I am going to end on that note and take any questions that you might have, and we've got a few more minutes. Thank you very, very much.
